“I had to separate them,” Jess whispered at last. “But in doing so, I killed her.”

As Jess spoke, Victorine’s eyes fell upon two trees, trees she remembered skipping gleefully around when she was a child, a child who had seen but didn’t yet understand that all around her flourished the merciless. She’d named those trees, she recalled now; had named the one holding aloft its skirt of leaves “the child,” had named the one with its interwoven branches “the mother.”

And so that last terrible sentence, and the anguish Victorine heard in Jess’s voice, decided her. She made a choice in that moment, one she would keep to for all the years following, never knowing if it had been the right thing to do, hoping only to prevent more hurt. She could not possibly tell Jess that James and Ellie could have married and raised their child. Because she was sure that Jess, as Ellie’s mother, would not survive the knowledge that the whole awful tragedy—perhaps even Ellie’s death, for if Ellie had been with James, she might have looked after herself properly—had been preventable, if only everyone had known the truth. Instead she would take the child and be its mother and she would remain silent, as Jess would, forever, the distant trees the only ones who knew what had really happened.

PART THIRTEEN

D’Arcy

Thirty-six

When Victorine finished speaking, D’Arcy was unable to do anything other than stare at her mother for several long minutes. Then she said, “Jess asked you to take the baby, didn’t she? I’m the baby.”

“You are.” Victorine kissed her forehead. “I asked Jess if I could have you. I think that’s perhaps what Jess was hoping for when she asked me to visit her in the first place, even if she didn’t know it at the time. She was so grief-stricken over Ellie that she couldn’t think straight, knew only that she suddenly had a baby to care for, and wasn’t sure she had the strength right then to do it. She was so convinced that, because she’d ruined Ellie’s life, she’d also ruin yours if she kept you. And she couldn’t bear to tell Dan any of it, couldn’t bear to burden him with a baby who might be the grandchild of Warren Stone, the man who’d raped her, the man he would rightly hate. So I told her about what had happened to me at school—that I couldn’t have children—and said I’d take you somewhere far away, where tragedy and the past wouldn’t find us.”

Victorine paused. Her lips quivered and her eyes misted with tears. It was the first time D’Arcy had ever seen her cry. She waited, knowing her mother would speak again once the pain had diminished to a less brutal degree.

“Jess would never tell Dan about the rape,” Victorine said at last. “Nobody spoke about such things back then. Except in that one article she wrote and was condemned for. And I’d unknowingly blocked out, like a nightmare, the memory of her being raped and all I could think was that if I’d been able to tell Dan about it back when it happened, then the whole relentless future we’d been subjected to could have been changed.”